#you can trust me with your favorite characters

[wyzzze]

One (slightly horrifying) thing I've learned from playing ZZZ is that the staff is VERY good at making characters that look one way but act in a completely unexpected way that has the ability to charm me.

For instance, before I started playing, I thought I wouldn't like Nicole. I thought she was going to be an overly shallow, snotty type that would be very "ohoho~" and annoying in a tropey way. And..she is "ohoho~" af but she's actually in a very delicate balancing act of being an absolute queen and a huge girlfailure and she steals the show whenever she's around. She's indeed vaguely all of the things you expect her to be but she does it in such a...charming way that she has me laughing and I'm ride or die w her now.

I didn't expect to like Lucy either! I thought she'd just be a normal tsundere but the one thing I've always really hated about typical tsunderes is their inability to be reasonable and how out of pocket they can be and Lucy...isn't like that. She's actually super reasonable and she sorta drives that ship. Calydon as a faction balances her traits out so well that when she barks orders it's like "ok yeah finally someone with common sense 😌✨️" if anything. She's still a princess-y tsundere but she missed the one trait I can't stand and that's kind of impressive to me tbh.

I didn't expect to dislike Seth per se but I didn't expect to like him that much either...he's a cop (his biggest sin) and he's...peppy. Which...isn't a sin...but it makes me (who is fucked up and evil) soooorta wish for him to uhh. break. 😇 Just a little bit! As a treat!! But he got me too okay....like fuuuck whatever! Whatever!!! Wet sad catboy with No Friends and his family problems that keep making him say "is my family normal? 🥺 it's normal right?" whateverrr!!! Just get in the car, loser!!! 🤧 god!!

I didn't think I'd like Harumasa! I have complete trust issues with characters that look like him! I expected him to be more of a ~sunshine on the outside but dark on the inside~ yandere-leaning kind of trope based on looks. But he's actually one of my favorite character archtypes instead...he's literally a sleepy guy with a billion nuanced problems and a fucked life. My favorite fucking food!! I owe you an apology, Mr. Harumasa!! I wasn't familiar with your game!!

But perhaps the most surprising twist of fate is me liking Wise. Like, I did NOT have high hopes for this boy, okay. I was NOT a believer. I didn't expect either one of them to have that much personality. When I first saw Wise's design with my working eyes I thought ZZZ devs fucking hated him. I thought he was going to be stale bread in terms of personality.

But like, Look! Look at us now!!

He's like a brother to me.

On god, the other day I blocked somebody for saying he was ugly with no love in their voice.

This game is so dangerous is what I'm saying bc the writers know how to get me to like characters that I have an allergy for. I am a Hateful Hateful person and it just keeps happening. They're like my little meow meows now, watch out or it could happen to u!

[lsargeantsgirl]

Who Is Your Best Friend?

pairing: Logan Sargeant x Williams driver reader

word count: 1.9k (whew)

warning: james vowles; angst; y/n used

character sorta based off of me

“y/n, the media team needs you by the end of the day,” James (ewww) said as you left his office from a meeting. 

“Okay. Bye,”

After you did the simulator a couple of times, setting your record, you went to the media room. The media intern saw you and waved you to the filming room. You sat down as she started the camera and she gave you the mini mic. 

“Ok, welcome, we are going to rapid-fire questions, then edit it with Logan’s answers.”

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” you said giddily.

“You ready,” you nodded, “ok, first one, what's your name.”

“y/n l/n,”

“Number?”

“78,”

“Birthday?”

“(your birthday)” “Favorite singer,”

“Taylor Swift”

“What’s Logan’s favorite singer?”

“I don’t know”

“Favorite Taylor song,”

“Hits different,”

“Logan’s”

“You belong with me,”

“Hometown”

“(your hometown)”

“Best friend”

“Logan,” you briefly thought of how much your friendship with Logan meant to you.

“Favorite hobby”

“Arts and crafts”

“Ok that’s it,” she says, stopping the camera.

“Noice, that was fun, I like that game.”

“Thank you, see you tomorrow, bye,” she said walking out of the room with you. As you rounded the corner into the hallway, you ran directly into Logan. 

“Hey, did you just do the media thing they wanted us for?”

“Yeah, it shouldn’t take you too long,” you informed him.

“Ok, nice, have a good day, see you tomorrow,” he said, smiling gently at you before walking away.

Your heart was beating out of your throat. Logan always made your thoughts go crazy. His accent always made you smile. He always, to you, more than your friend, you. You had issues with trusting people when you were a kid so when you met Logan you emotionally bonded to him. You hoped that Logan thought of you as highly as you did him.

A couple of weeks later when you were scrolling on your social medias, you saw the video of the rapid-fire questions. You watched, laughing at yourself and Logan. When the best friend question came up, your heart sank as you saw Logan answer without a beat Oscar. You thought he would be different because he was your best friend. It turns out he was just another one you thought was your friend but he didn’t reciprocate. 

Later that day, your high school friend came over to your apartment. You were gossiping and catching up on life when she brought up Logan. Your mood soured; she noticed.

“What’s with that face? Are you and Logan no longer friends?” she asked hesitantly.

“No, No, we are, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought he was my best friend, but he without any hesitation said Oscar. And I know he’s known Oscar for way longer than me but I feel like we’re closer than them. I don’t know what to do because if I stay acting like nothing happened then I will feel bad and sad but if I ignore him then he might feel bad,” you said fast.

“Oh ok, I thought something unforgivable happened between you two. But maybe you should just talk to him,” you shot her a glare, “or let him bring it up when you ignore him.”

“I think I’ll just try to forget and try not to get closer to him. But if he brings it up then I’ll talk about it.”

Turns out you didn’t do very well at trying to forget about it. You thought about it every single time you saw Logan. It was like a nagging guiltiness you felt when he would talk to you with his cute American accent and his radiant smile. He made you feel guilty without actually doing anything.

“Y/n, the media team wants us to make a video. I think we should go bother the people interviewing down there.”

“Ok, you can do it if you want,” you said flippantly. You were distracted by a text your friend had sent you. Logan snatched your phone from your hands and started reading the texts. 

“Oooh, y/n has a crush, on whooo,” he says with a schoolboy tone. You tried taking your phone back but Logan kept holding it over his head. You were shorter than him so it wasn’t easy trying your phone back. 

“Logan, give me my phone back,” you said.

“Tell me who your crush is first.”

“Logan, no.”

“Tell me.”

He kept holding your phone higher than you could reach. The only way you could get your phone back was risky and very inappropriate to do because it's what needs to be done. You ‘lowered’ your defenses. You nut-tapped him and when he bent down in reflex. When his defenses were lowered, you took back your phone and walked away. 

TIME SKIP

The door to the room you were in opened, and Logan came into your driver's room after a while. “Sooo, are you gonna tell me who you were texting about,” he said after flopping onto your couch.

“No, why are you here?” you said while working on some homework because you were a college student while being an F1 driver. Yes, it was hard but you were so close to graduation. 

“Media still wants that video.”

“Do you want to make a TikTok or what?” you ask.

“Ehh, I don’t know, we should post the video of you physically harassing me.” You slowly turn around and if looks could kill you would be in jail for murder.

“Logan, if you post that, I will personally push you off the track and then hit you again. I would not care if James kills me but I will kill you,” You said while Logan just sat smiling at you. 

“You look if you were my type, hot mad,” Logan said, now he was lying fully across the couch with his hands behind his head. He had that grin that always made you guilty. 

You stood up and walked over to Logan. You bent down to his level and your eyes bore into his. Unbeknownst to Logan, your heart rate was so high it would put anyone into a heart attack. You gripped his chin as his smile faded.

“Logan Hunter Sargeant, I will kill you if you post that even in a conversation with your bestie Oscar. If you continue to ask me who that was, I will do things you don’t want to know to you.” 

Logan grabbed you and pulled you into himself, laughing. “Baby, you don’t scare me.” He had you on his chest. “Seems like I scare you.” He could feel your heart beating out of your chest.

“The only reason I would be scared of you is because of your stupidity. It takes a special kind of stupid,” you said pushing up on his chest with your knee between his legs. You moved it a bit higher so you were essentially kneeing him in the nuts. You could see when he started to be in pain. “, to think you scare me.  But Americans are known to be stupid.”

You got off Logan and went back to doing your homework. You didn’t see when Logan slipped out but you felt his eyes on you before he left.

TIME SKIP

You were standing on the balcony in the paddock in Singapore. You were breathing in the fresh air. You had been overwhelmed with the end of the season. You were glad to end it but you were also sad your second season was over. 

Logan joined you on the patio to tell you that the media still wanted that video. Unbeknownst to you he was already in the making of that video. 

“It is so peaceful out here. It would be a shame if something disrupted the peacefulness.”

“Logan, you already ruined it by coming out here.”

“Oh, really, I thought I was helping you enjoy the view and the experience.”

“Well, you weren’t. You just made me so much anxious. Thanks for that.”

Logan pulled something out of his pocket. He messed with it for a second raised his arm and threw whatever it was. He ducked below the edge of the balcony. The people below were in the middle of an interview when the, now apparent to you, paper airplane hit them.

They all turned their heads to you. You were a deer caught in the headlights. Frozen in fear, they turned the camera towards you. You turned to Logan who was crouched down beside you and kicked him. 

“Logan, you idiot. Why did you throw that at them.”

“To them, I didn’t throw it.”

You kicked him again, turned, and stormed into your driver's room. When you opened your computer you saw an email from James. The only line in the email was ‘Get into my office now.’ You knew what he was going to say. You prepared yourself for what he was going to say. 

You slipped into his office. James looked up from his computer.

“Y/n, why did you throw a paper airplane at the Haas people in the interview?” he said, angered.

“I didn’t do that. If ask your favorite little American driver, he’ll say I threw it but I didn’t.”

“I’m not punishing you but if you do it again, I will,” he threatened.

“I didn’t do it in the first place but I won’t let Logan do it again.”

He nodded, dismissing you. You walked to Logan’s driver's room.

You went into his room without knocking. “Logan, I swear to God, go tell James that you threw that paper airplane at them and it wasn’t me.”

“Hello to you,”

“Logan,” you said walking closer to him, not realizing he was shirtless.

“This is the first time you have talked to me without me starting the conversation in like two months. I like it when other people start conversations with me and I don’t start it.”

“Logan, you weren’t worth my time,” you professed.

“Worth your time?”

“Have you ever had someone who you thought was your best friend say that they don’t think that you are their best friend? No, you probably haven’t because no one would want to be your friend,” you said raising your voice.

“Is that why you ignored me for all this time? I didn’t say you when they asked who my best friend was?”

“Yes, I thought you were my best friend. But obviously, you don’t think the same.”

“Yeah, you aren’t my best friend, because I don’t see you as a friend,” the color drained from your face as you lowered your head.

“Okay, never mind. Let’s forget this ever happened,” you said as your voice was shaking. Slowly turning around to leave.

He walks behind you to the door. You open the door and he reaches over your shoulder to close it. He forcibly turned you around, pushing you against the door. “I don’t see you as a friend. I see you as a woman who I hope is attracted to me as much as I am to her.” 

He stares into your eyes, “what?” you ask.

“I like you, maybe even love you,” he said with adoration. 

“Logan,” you said breathlessly confused, “what, you like like me?”

“Yeah, if we were in elementary school,” he cracked a smile which you reflected, “then, yeah, I like like you.” 

“I like like you too,” you whispered.

“Can I kiss you?”

“Yeah, if you say I’m your best friend.”

“You are my best friend,” He said giggly as he kissed you.

Author's Note

Thank you to everyone who liked my other posts. love you

[fuckyeahisawthat]

I love how Viktor's ego sneaks up on you in the show. It made me think about how often arrogance/egotism (particularly of the STEM Guy Asshole Genius flavor) gets lazily shorthanded in media by having the character just be a dick to people. Viktor doesn't do that. He's reserved but generally polite, not verbally insulting or condescending. (We also just...do not see him interact with many people other than Jayce, whom he considers his intellectual peer.) He wants to leave a legacy but he doesn't want the kind of personal spotlight that Jayce gets thrust into. And he does genuinely want to help people, which is one of his own blind spots, because if he has good intentions then he can't possibly be going down the wrong path. He's too smart to make a mistake like that, right? So you can get pretty far into his character arc before you realize oh, this guy thinks he is right about everything and it's gonna be everybody's problem.

It also does one of my favorite things which we'll call "nooooo don't let your understandable defense mechanism metastasize into a fatal flaw." Because I'm sure that arrogance was useful armor for a lot of his time in Piltover. He's isolated, poor, disabled, from the Undercity, no powerful friends (very possibly no friends at all), but at least he is fucking smarter than everyone else in the room. He says it to Jayce in the beginning: "Nobody believed in me." He's probably had years of telling himself I know I'm right about this, I know I'm smart enough to solve this problem, don't listen to what anyone else says, in isolation, without anyone he trusts to occasionally be like "bro what the FUCK are you on about." And, when it comes to science, his predictions about being right have almost always been accurate. And then the ego comes in with the logical fallacy that he must then be right about everything, and if you disagree it's just because you're not as smart as he is, and the most efficient solution is simply to take that ability to disagree away from you.

Something occurred to me that I find really fascinating about Viktor. He truly has two fatal flaws: ambition and ego.

He is obsessed with his legacy, almost from the point when we meet him: "Do you think it was my life's ambition to be an assistant?" He also mentions legacy when he's talking with Heimerdinger after his hospitalization. He wants to make contributions that matter. He wants to change the world.

But ambition alone isn't enough to push him into the atrocities he ends up committing. He also, very early on, comments on Jayce's ego, but Jayce, remarkably, isn't very egotistical. He might come across that way, but that's because Jayce is a people pleaser, and the people around him are pushing him into the spotlight for their own reasons.

But Viktor thinks he knows better than everyone. He knows better than Jayce how to make hextech work. He knows better than Heimerdinger how to control and wield magic. He has a brief moment of humility when Sky dies, which, ironically, the hex uses to manipulate him to grow his ego even more.

He knows better than those shimmer addicts what they need. He knows better than Singed how to save Vander. He knows better than Jinx what she could do with her skills. He knows better than everyone, and if they would just stop arguing, he could bring true peace and harmony to the world.

And because he thinks he knows better than everyone, he erases everyone's humanity. He removes the parts of them that would argue with him, push back against his actions, or cause any conflict whatsoever. Only harmony is allowed, so if you disagree with him, the part of you that disagrees will simply be removed. Viktor knows what's right. You do not.

This is fascinating, because, to all outward appearances, he's pretty meek and mild. He doesn't raise his voice, he doesn't scoff at people, he doesn't insult them. He just quietly, internally, thinks that they are ignorant and wrong.

And that's why only Jayce could get through to him. Because only Jayce went through the same journey Viktor did while retaining his humility. Jayce never wanted to be in charge. Jayce never wanted to change the world. He just wanted to show everyone the beauty in magic that he saw as a boy—the beauty that was Viktor all along. Jayce never cared about ego or ambition. He didn't want Viktor's legacy. He just wanted his partner back.

[llemon-soda]

i dislike them...

[soupmanspeaks]

You know what

In celebration of a common CC W

Here's some rare Soup art of the boy

[sleepy-crypt1d]

people dont write wheatley mean enough, ive decided. like, he's an asshole. that's a huge part of his character. YES he is also pathetic and a fucking loser who i could drop kick.

that's why he's an asshole.

he's mean and self-centered and uncaring because that is how he has always been treated.

he frequently calls you brain dead, he throws out the idea of turning you in to GLaDOS' so he can live, he spends a full minute insulting children and calling manual laborers stupid - because that's how he's been treated. he was made to be stupid, he was abandoned by his creators because they didn't care, and then he's insulted time and time again by being called a moron when, if you actually look at the game from his perspective, he's the one who's did all the work!!

he has been kicked, insulted, almost killed and ignored his entire life no SHIT he's more than happy to turn those exact same actions onto other people without any sort of care for their feelings. no one's ever cared for his?? so why should he??

people either have him as a stammering uwu little baby who's either completely helpless or a creep or they make him super over confident when he's neither. yes, he stutters and yes there are times he's embarrassed but that's because he overthinks and has a hard time putting things into words. he is fucking terrifying, yes, but it's not because he's confident. it's because he's willing to do anything just to prove he can.

wheatley is so mischaracterized it hurts and it makes me so upset. this game has been out for ten years and i need my guy to be seen as the actual nuanced character he is.

[sketchy-scribs-n-doods]

i need a little notes section to be added to all block list functions in social media bc my goldfish memory having ass don't always remember why i blocked someone

see i looove blocking ppl and curating my online experience with wild abandon, but that means it can be anything from 'this person is a fucking terf' to 'this person is harmless but has annoying opinions about fictional characters i like' to 'this person once said mango was disgusting and i took it personally'

so now tumblr or whatever is telling me i have a mf blocked and i gotta sit there and wonder if they're a bigot or just have bad opinions on cheesecake

[remember-ur-alive]

CHAT I MISS MY S^W YA0I

[drifloonz]

The multiple miki thing might be because Miki could've been based on Charizard M and that thing is known for cloning itself.

Tbh i cant fault shadowmalerenamon for completely changing doors open when rewriting it. Having missingno be the main antagonist was miles better than how Steve was in the original.

( mention of suicide ig )

i respectfully disagree . i see where you're coming from but i think all of the rewritten strangled... duology i guess bc strangled red itself never got one

( thank fucking god to be honest. it needs No change. although at the same time its kind of funny it never got one bc its the most popular one and going more into him as a Person if smr didnt fuck it up would be nice ... but im too attached to my own interp based off of his canon implications to care about what smr kind of has to give. and he already did that in og strangled red, to a degree, although it focuses on the tragedy there is character stuff to be extrapolated from the implications of the story if youre very deeply ill. like me. )

- is a lot less character-focused, at least on steven specifically, and is focused on explaining or rewriting shit that never needed to be explained or rewritten. it is a revisit and reinterpretation of the story, that to me, is just purely kind of . Not good or fun to read. and the new shit it introduces is fucking stupid imo. steven being banished by the town instead of... fucking. killing himself ( especially specifically by cop. that's lame and way more boring + FUCK THE POLICE !!! + It feels out of character for steven he would just do it himself like actually. Also yk. hanging yourself is narratively thematic and ironic. ) or whatever goes so much harder .

guy who loves his town and home region and wanting to be a role model and wanting to be cool so badly being driven mad and then the entirety of kanto, his homeland, forsaking him and walling him off goes crazy . Also because it implies they're scared of him to some degree which also makes me go crazy as an implication.

[ more put below bc i love to fucking yap about strangled red and how much i dont like the rewrites ]

i Will not step down from 'the rewrites arent good' . Doors open is mostly bad because stevens characterization is garbage. even though its random and from left field ( why the fuck is he in sprout tower ) it couldve been handled well if it was written better characterization-wise.

also i supposed the 'M charizard makes sense. not. not really i don't actually think smr thought that through. if he did, which he couldve because she is named #'M# in Strangled Red, cool, but i still think it's just to make the "miki" name thing with 4 party members he has. which is cool admittedly. it's just that i hope it is never explained why he has 4. and it never has since, doors open rewrite didnt do anything with that thank god.

and bc he wouldnt have any other mon other than miki post-incident and afaik that thing only replaces existing partymembers, and steven canonically releases all his team in SR + pokemon avoid him. but yea. Doors open i treat as a 'spinoff' in a sense bc nothing from it really makes sense when properly thought through, and its basically there to make the lost silver crossover i feel. also, yk, he literally says "Never." in strangled red when you press switch on 'M / missingno/revived/whatever you want to call miki post revival. its kind of out of character for canon-compliant steven to have anything other than miki post-incident for these 3 reasons - i only made a team for him post incident bc im autistic about pokemon and pokemon teams so that was for fun.

basically it makes more plotholes and questions than not the more strangled reds plot stuff tries to be explained or added upon esp in the remakes which i think are not fun reads if you like steven as a character anyways. and also bc strangled and doors open in the ogs are easter eggs. trying to explain what is supposed to be an in universe easter egg in pokemon would obviously be kind of a lesson in futility. not. not exactly but at least in the way smr does it.

strangled makes sense, you just go to his fucking house and hes there. yea. doors open is like. Yea hes in johto now. dont ask. but its also easily explainable as... He just fucked off to johto. For what reason? idk. hates kanto bc theyve forsaken him and banished him to the Woods, just wanted fresh air i guess, or just for fun. these are all more plausible reasons.

iirc the rewrite doesnt even say why hes there and if it does the reason is convoluted and not needed. i think its just 'hes a ghost hallucination... thing??? following the mc which is the most boring route to go for with steven and the most uninspired thing ever, and missingno was not the antagonist just a plot device in the og story Why are we focusing on it so much.' and its still a plot device in the rewrites! it isnt explained ( good the explanation would be kind of awful ) and i cant see any good way to explain missingno other than the way i do as a fun idea. which is biased but the 'failed clone of mew number 3' is a fun idea.

this is an insane ramble from a deranged person. if you can't tell i fucking love steven as a character and smr does him dirty except in strangled red, really. strangled... is fine but bc he barely talks in that one and when he does its like. yea. that checks out.

no hate to you btw none of it was directed at you specifically just smr and strangled reds various canons. you just gave me an excuse to ramble about how much i dislike the remakes tbh. I fucking LOVE analyzing why i hate things esp involving steven bc hes not greatly written by his og creator and not often greatly written by the fandom either .

[transyourgenderhere]

Your favorite characters are trans, by the way.

[protagonistscum]

realized one of my top favorite ship dynamics is leader and their trusted right hand/servant/knight/protector

[percki]

they don’t talk about the dopamine rush you feel when your favorite person says ‘oh i’ve never seen that’ and you are ecstatic simply because you cannot wait to show them

[oatmealaddiction]

Okay but the weirdest thing about the whole "Brotherhood is better you should skip 03" discourse that's become commonplace now, it sort of forgets the world Brotherhood came out in and why you should watch the original Fullmetal Alchemist. When Brotherhood came out, the original Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the most beloved and most watched animes of all time. Brotherhood assumes you the audience have already seen it because of course you have, everyone has seen it, so it skips important information and speeds the story up because it doesn't want to bore you with things you already know. Have you ever wondered "hey why does the first episode of Brotherhood kind of suck, and why am I being introduced to like 50 new characters, and why are they acting like I know what the hell an alchemist is?" It's because Brotherhood thinks you've seen 03.

The first 7 or so episodes of Brotherhood constitute dozens of chapters in the manga, and the first 25 or so episodes of the original Fullmetal Alchemist. The Nina Tucker episode in Brotherhood, in FMA 03 takes up nearly three episodes. Yoki gets a backstory in 03 and it's genuinely one of the best episodes and taken directly from the manga and Brotherhood glosses over it because: duh, you've already seen it. And so if you skip the original you miss out on dozens of really great character building episodes like Ed and Al meeting Hughes for the first time and getting to spend a whole episode helping him free a train from terrorists, or Ed and Roy having a duel that expands on the relationship they have, or episodes where the brothers just help out random people in towns before the major story gets going.

The original also paces itself quite a bit better than Brotherhood and is more in line with the mangas storytelling. In the manga we don't find out about The Gate until nearly two dozen chapters in, and the same goes for the original anime. Like, that's a twist reveal in those stories, and it's weird that the most watched series is the one where they tell you all about The Gate in the first two episodes because they assume you've already seen the original show.

What's more, people don't know that Hiromu Arakawa helped write for the anime while she was still in the middle of writing the manga, and as a result was inspired to write scenes in Brotherhood that the anime did first. That scene of Edward getting impaled by a falling beam? Directly inspired by a similar scene in the original anime. There's a lot of little instances of that and they're great when you can recognize parallels and things in Brotherhood that are direct references to the original anime, but people don't notice any of that anymore. Because the original anime is just an automatic skip these days, and it's a bummer because people don't realize what a giant it was back before Brotherhood was released. They treat it as *bad,* not realizing it was one of the most beloved anime of its time and the problems people take issue with have a lot more to do with personal taste than any kind of actual flaw in the writing. Brotherhood was never meant to dethrone it, and the original anime was always supposed to be part of the viewing experience which is why those first few episodes of Brotherhood are so fast paced. So like, please stop telling people Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 is a skip, or it's bad, or you don't need it because Brotherhood is better. Regardless if you think Brotherhood is better or not, the original wrote Brotherhood's check. It was huge, it was beloved, and Brotherhood is *banking* on the knowledge you've seen all of it and loved it. And trust me when I say there is so much to love about the original series. It's still my favorite branch of the FMA franchise, and it's worth your time, I promise you.

[weirdsociology]

hey writers we have to talk.

if you've read any romance or fanfic in the past twenty years (i know you have), you know that there are a certain number of scents associated with hot dudes. you can probably recite the list of Things Men in Fic smell like in your sleep: leather, black pepper, pine, sandalwood, "something uniquely him", clean sweat, and if the character has ever fucking been within 50 yards of a firearm, something called "cordite".

here's the thing.

NO ONE SMELLS LIKE CORDITE.

cordite was a highly specific type of smokeless gunpowder developed in the 1890s by england specifically and used mostly in wwi.

if your good-smelling guy is not (a) english (b) using a very specific type of british rifle (c) dying in a trench in flanders, he does not smell like cordite. technically even if he does meet all those conditions he still doesn't smell like cordite because he smells like trenchfoot.

the point is, cordite is so far from universal that no one but the most hardcore gun nerds give a single shit about it. making your Sexy Hero smell like cordite is like naming a cassette-only bootleg live recording from the 1970s as your favorite grateful dead album. everyone at the party hates you immediately and knows you're doing it for clout. also, it's just factually... wrong. please stop. i know everyone else is doing it, but you can do the right thing here, i believe in you.

so what do people who are using guns smell like?

well if your story is set before the late 1880s, the smell of a fired gun is black powder, which, unfortunately, smells like seventeen flatulent cows have been shoved in a tire factory. trust me, you do not want your Hot Dude to smell like black powder. it's b a d.

if your story is set after the late 1880s, guns are using some variety of modern 'smokeless' powder - which speaking broadly doesn't really have a ton of scent when used. it does have some, but it's sort of non-descript: the best way i can describe it is the sweet, ozone, hot-plate smell of popping your car hood with a warm engine.

people who use guns a lot don't smell like fired guns all the time anyway, so while those scents might work in a fight scene, they're not realistic all the time. but there are some things that your Sexy Shootist will smell like basically 24/7 and that's metal and gun oil. metal you can go and sniff (i recommend non-stainless steel), but if you want a reference, most gun oils have a sharp, organic smell that's not dissimilar to canola oil but muskier and with a tang overtop. it's not unlikely leather is in the mix as well due to routine handling of leather equipment and gear. modern gear also tends to have a certain smell although it varies by production country and storage conditions - lots of opportunities there.

in conclusion: gunslingers and hired killers and military folks can be sexy and smell great on page, but i am begging you not to say "cordite" when you mean "gunpowder" ever again. we can do this. we are writers and therefore pedants. i believe in us!

[spacedlexi]

okay fine !!!! be the change you wish to see in the world or whatever 🙄

i desperately need to be part of an active violentine server. this would fix me i think

[potatoesandsunshine]

trying to figure out how this courier would navigate the dlcs and it’s like. well. it’s not great is it.